Buy those Image Comics!

It’s Cyber Monday, and that means deals online for stuff. So much of it is appliances and electronics and what have you, from what Holly and I were seeing… but then, there’s some places where there are some great deals going on. One that we jumped on was the Image Comics sale on ComiXology (which ends today!).

Image Comics is more of a publishing house than the big two – DC and Marvel. The creators maintain the rights to their characters and stories, as you can read about on their Submissions page. Some great comics are published by Image, though the flagship right now might be Saga (it’s certainly the featured comic for the sale). Or as Jonathan Hickman put it,

As an aside, I'd like to remind everyone that at Image Comics people buy the books for the creators, not the characters.

I was over scanning through his tweets wondering what he was up to (a series written and drawn by Hickman called Frontier being my answer), after his wonderful Marvel-universe-ending run from Fantastic Four through Secret Wars, all of which I’ve blogged on before…

I think I want to be the go-to guy comic companies hire to end franchises. Like a Viking funeral director for conflicted IP.

He’s currently all about his Image comics, with East of West being my favorite of those (and prophetic for our times). Picked up what I was missing there in the sale, as well as the whole of Sex Criminals by Matt Fraction (author of Hawkeye) and some other stuff. Expect some comics blogging here soon!

As to Hickman’s point about creators not wanting to do their most creative work with DC or Marvel… it does make sense. And it also actually makes some sense thinking back to Hickman’s work on Avengers: he introduced new versions of a number of pre-existing characters, like Starbrand, Hyperion, Captain Universe, Smasher… There are ways to be creative while not creating much new IP.

One of the things I unabashedly love about Image is that if you want something to be a surprise in your book, it absolutely can be.

So if you’re looking for something new in comics, if you’re looking for a story that’s not superheroes, or something unexpected, or something in a favorite genre, or something else by that writer you liked or that artist you liked… go check out the Image Comics sale!

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― Simon Pegg